Published: Feb. 9, 2024 at 5:26 p.m. ET
Amazon.com Inc. shares continued their upward trend on Friday, reaching their highest close in over two years. The e-commerce company’s stock rose 2.7% in the Friday session, closing at $174.45. This marks the highest closing level since Dec. 9, 2021, when Amazon’s stock AMZN closed at $147.17, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Don’t…
Amazon.com Inc. shares kept advancing on Friday, achieving their highest close in over two years.
The e-commerce company’s stock rose by 2.7% in Friday’s session, ending the day at $174.45, the highest level since Dec. 9, 2021 when Amazon’s stock
AMZN
closed at $147.17, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
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Amazon briefly overtaken Alphabet Inc.
GOOG
GOOGL
as the third most valuable U.S. company by market capitalization last week, before dropping to the No. 4 spot. Nevertheless, the recent momentum for Amazon shares has helped the company maintain a top-four position as Nvidia Corp.
NVDA
closely follows.
Alphabet closed Friday’s session with a $1.86 trillion market cap, whereas Amazon’s was $1.81 trillion and Nvidia’s was $1.78 trillion.
The reaction from Wall Street to the earnings of major technology companies this quarter has been mixed, with Amazon’s results being well received.
See also: Amazon says the ‘magic words.’ They spurred a $130 billion market-cap boost.
“Overall the overhangs which kept a lid on AMZN shares — e-commerce deceleration in 2021, e-commerce deceleration and margin compression in 2022 and AWS deceleration in 2023 — will have dissipated throughout 2024,” UBS analyst Stephen Ju wrote in a note to clients following those results.
Amazon has been a significant driver of earnings growth for the S&P 500 consumer discretionary sector, with its quarterly earnings per share increasing from 3 cents to $1 in the latest quarter. The consumer discretionary sector is now expected to post 33% growth in EPS for the fourth quarter as per FactSet, but without Amazon, that would swing to a decline of about 1%.
